Andrew reviews his favorite movie of 2015, The Redwood Massacre.
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| "Jock itch has me angry as balls!" |
There’s an unspoken rule of thumb in low budget
slasher horror films that the adversary, whatever it may be, shows it face late
in the game to allow for buildup towards a feeling vaguely resembling
dread. Within the first few minutes of
the latest disappointingly generic shoestring budgeted teen slasher thriller The Redwood Massacre, the uninspired lovechild
of Jason Voorhees and Scarecrow from Batman
Begins shows his face immediately and thus drains the occasionally scenic
looking Scottish horror flick of any sort of dread the filmmakers were aiming
to build. Despite making occasional use
of an abandoned stone cabin amid Scotland’s cool green mountaintops and buckets
of karo syrup with red food coloring, The
Redwood Massacre unfortunately a tedious and at times, annoying bore.
Since we’ve seen this story to death, there’s little
reason to go into the story so let’s break down how The Redwood Massacre handles the tropes of the genre. The first thing any avid horror fan will
notice are the stock sound effects. The
clichéd silent burlap-bag masked villain in overalls with a red plaid shirt
draws his sword with the same exact stock sound effect every time, including
unintentionally hilarious moments where squishy sounds of stabbings or
characters being punched in the face quite literally have the sound mixers
hitting the same button repeatedly like a hyperactive eight year old button
mashing his Sega Genesis version of Mortal
Kombat. As previously mentioned,
tons of red food coloring suffice for gore in this movie and though there are a
lot of stabbings and disembowelments, there’s not a lot here to disgust the
most gleefully hardened horror fans.
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| "Gee Sally. I hope we get sex and smores before the Jock Itch killer gets us." |
Granted the lone survivor isn’t your average damsel in
distress. Rather, she’s disarmingly
ordinary though her purple T-shirt with a blue dinosaur with the word
“Vegetarian” imprinted on it was I suppose somewhat unique. That is until she’s trying to kick a metal
bolted door down and the button mashing sound designer goes crazy once again
with the stock sound effects. I will
give The Redwood Massacre props for
exploiting the Texas Chainsaw
thriller in Scotland and the towering mountains and dense forests will always
look beautiful no matter what film they’re in.
Otherwise, low budget horror fans aren’t going to get anything new with
a film that successfully travels in one ear and out the other. It’s not so much that this sort of movie has
been done to death, but that it doesn’t try to be much more than another
halfhearted exercise in teens running away from a standard bad guy with an
axe. The laziness of the sound mix did
at least manage to evoke unintentional comedy comparable to the goofy ADR work
in Robert Clouse’s Gymkata.
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SCORE:
-Andrew Kotwicki